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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27948686">A Moment of Danger: Fandoms and their Archives</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/CasTrudeau/pseuds/CasTrudeau'>CasTrudeau</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Archive of our Own - Freeform, FanFiction.Net, FanLib - Freeform, Fandom Archives, LiveJournal, archives, open doors</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 23:35:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,726</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27948686</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/CasTrudeau/pseuds/CasTrudeau</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>In “Constituting an archive”, Stuart Hall wrote: “An archive may be largely about ‘the past’ but it is always ‘re-read’ in the light of the present and the future: and in that reprise, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, it always flashes up before us as a moment of danger. Thus it is extremely important that archives are committed to inclusiveness, since it is impossible to foretell what future practitioners, critics and historians will want to make of it.” </p><p>In this data story turned fanfiction, I explore the nature of fandom archives, their history, and how fanwork is maintained in our new digital age.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. #Genesis: My Fanfiction Experience</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>Christmas, 2014. Callahan, Florida. </em>
</p><p>Within the depths of my stocking, I found a small, individually wrapped Nintendo DS cartridge. Somehow, I still had (have) my original Nintendo DS Lite (a white thing with cracked corners and peeling stickers, but with working buttons and screens). I peeled away the wrapping to find <em>Pokémon: Black</em>.</p><p> </p><p>My relationship with Pokémon is unshakable. As a toddler, my grandparents gave me a stuffed Pikachu. My grandmother always put him in the top of my closet to electrocute any potential monsters. I was given my first Pokémon game (<em>Pokémon Red</em> for the Gameboy) at age 10, the same age as Ash when he starts his journey in the show.  Recognizing my addiction to the bright pixels of these pocket monsters, my parents continued to feed into my interest until I was a junior in high school.</p><p> </p><p>What I found so intriguing about <em>Pokémon: Black</em> compared to the others I had played previously was the storyline. Early editions of the game focused on two goals: filling your Pokedex and defeating the Elite Four for the title of Pokémon Champion. You occasionally fought off the wretched Team Rocket to keep them from hurting any of your Pokémon pals, but it never took over the gameplay. <em>Black </em>and <em>White </em>were different in the sense that Team Plasma had a serious goal: free all Pokémon from trainers and the balls they are imprisoned in. This was a major morality question I never thought of as a young player.</p><p> </p><p>It was one particular cut scene, however, that set my life as a fan into motion. In Nimbasa City there is a Ferris wheel. At this point in the game, N is still a relative stranger. Your character does not know his true role. He suggests that as Team Plasma runs away, you ride the Ferris wheel together. As you climb further into the sky, he reveals that he is your true nemesis: the King of Team Plasma. Every interaction leading up to this point and every interaction afterward inspired my young teenage romantic. Aware of what fanfiction was, I wondered if others saw the underlying romantic plot of <em>Pokémon: Black. </em>The day after I finished playing the game, I joined FanFiction.Net.</p><p> </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. #Fandom Archives Past and Present</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em>In writing about internet archives and websites, I do not want to forget about fandom’s print roots. Fanclubs and fan-published zines are the backbone of our current culture, the foundation we’ve built our community upon. Within this project, however, I gravitate towards these internet archives that store and maintain fandom’s history. </em>
</p><p><strong>FanLib: </strong>Founded in 2002 by Craig Singer, David B. Williams, and Chris M. Williams as part of their production company, My2Centences. FanLib advertised itself first as not an archive, by crowdwriting software. They ran marketing campaigns, the most notorious one being for The L Word. It was in 2007 when the founders cashed in FanLib’s potential as an archive. They advertised themselves as a community in which content creators could submit, comment, and vote on their works in hopes of (hopefully) gaining notoriety and profit (see below brochure). In 2008, FanLib was purchased by Disney and promptly shutdown, much to user’s surprise. Among those who used the platform, there were many critiques of the site’s “for-profit” nature, the advertisements, and the fact creators lost individual rights to their work during a time of tension over copyright law.   </p><p><strong>LiveJournal: </strong>A blogging platform that gained popularity in fandom culture in the 2000s. In 2007 there was mass censorship on the site through what fans called “Strikethrough” and “Boldthrough.” Journals that contained certain material (child pornography, rape, other sexual content or violence) were deleted, including a Harry Potter fanfiction community that wrote adult sensitive content. This lead to discussions of censorship and ownership of fan-created work. (You can view a timeline of LiveJournal as a fandom archive on FanLore.)</p><p><strong>Fanfiction.Net: </strong>A multifandom fanfiction archive, FanFiction.net is one of the oldest and largest fanfiction sites. Founded in 1998 by Xing Li, the site still runs strong. It features a simpler filter and browsing system, can often glitch, and is limited in its formatting.</p><p><strong>Archive of Our Own (A03): </strong>A03 is another multifandom archive founded in 2008 by the Organization of Transformative Works (OTW). The Organization of Transformative Works is a non-profit organization run by fan volunteers. Along with A03, they have other projects such as FanLore and Open Doors. A03 is a hosting site that allows members to post fantexts, primarily written ones, with hopes to include fanvidios, podcasts, and art on their server. A03 is hosted on open-source archiving software, which they share through <a href="https://github.com/otwcode/otwarchive">GitHub</a>, allowing fans to generate their own archives as they wish. A03 and the OTW believe in the importance of inclusivity, accessibility, and individual ownership of fan-created work.  </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>References: <br/>FanLib Wiki: https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanLib<br/>LiveJournal Wiki: https://fanlore.org/wiki/LiveJournal<br/>Fanfiction.Net Wiki: https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanFiction.Net<br/>Archive of Our Own Wiki: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Archive_of_Our_Own</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. #The Academic Definition of Archives</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In “Radial Recordkeeping: How Community Archives are Changing How We Think About Records”, Jeanette Bastian defines the nature of <em>community archives. </em>She first labels what constitutes a community. Fandom communities fall under her categories 1) “a group of individuals with “a common interest, belief, or lifestyle—shared characteristics other than place that could fit into a variety of categories such as religious beliefs, gender orientation, occupation, ethnicity, origins, activities such as sports, and civic organizations” and 2) “a common purpose—shared event or missions or attachment to a common idea or calling” (71).</p><p>In its most general definition, a community archive “refers to the materials generated by not-for-profit and non-governmental entities, by a particular group or community” (73).</p><p>Community archives are important in both my and Bastian’s opinion because they “offer a way to reach beyond traditional archival institutions that are often views as exclusive and exclusionary” (74). They allow those groups that are frequently oppressed or underrepresented to document their history and challenge the dominant culture.</p><p>Fanfiction, as a form of cultural criticism, allow fans to critique the media canon. They can envision themselves in the narrative by generating content that features queer characters, characters of color, and other such marginalized identities. It also allows fans to critique the ways in which these groups are represented in our media. Fanfiction, as a cultural phenomenon, is an important thing to archive, as it pushes the boundaries of what we, as consumers accept from our media.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>References: <br/>Bastian, Jeanette. “Radial Recordkeeping: How Community Archives Are Changing How We Think About Records.” Libraries and Archives in the Digital Age, by Susan Laura. Mizruchi, Palgrave Macmillan., Cham, 2020, pp. 69–82.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. #A Proposal (May 2007)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Posted to her LiveJournal, astolat wrote:</p><p></p><blockquote>
  <p>
    <em>That said, the people behind <a href="https://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlib">fanlib...</a> don't actually care about fanfic, the fanfic community, or anything except making money off content created entirely by other people and getting media attention. They don't have a single fanfic reader or writer on their board; they don't even have a single woman on their board. They're creating a lawsuit-bait site while being bad potential defendants, and they deserve to be chased out being pelted with rocks.</em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>But even if they were, which I doubt is going to happen, because hey, they have people and money, we're still left with this problem: we are sitting quietly by the fireside, creating piles and piles of content around us, and other people are going to look at that and see an opportunity. And they are going to end up creating the front doors that new fanfic writers walk through, unless we stand up and build our OWN front door.</em>
  </p>
  <p>
    <em>We need a central archive of our own, something like <a href="https://fanlore.org/wiki/Animemusicvideos.org">animemusicvideos.org</a>. Something that would NOT hide from google or any public mention, and would clearly state our case for the legality of our hobby up front, while not trying to make a profit off other people's IP and instead only making it easier for us to celebrate it, together, and create a welcoming space for new fans that has a sense of our history and our community behind it.</em>
  </p>
</blockquote><p>Read her entire proposal on <a href="https://fanlore.org/wiki/An_Archive_Of_One%27s_Own_(post_by_astolat)">Fanlore</a>. </p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. #Archive of Our Own: How it Compares</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Due to its longevity and popularity, other fandom archives cannot really hold a match to Archive of Our Own (except for FanFiction.Net). In the November 2020 OTW Newsletter, A03 announced that they had reached 3 million registered users and had canonized their 40,000<sup>th</sup> fandom. While Fanfiction.net and other sites do not catalog their growing database in the same way, these numbers demonstrate the mass amount of fanwork stored within A03.</p><p>As a small experiment, I decided to compare the most popular content submissions on FanLib from November 2007 and May 2008 (the years when FanLib was at the height of it’s use as an archive) to those same fandoms on A03. I did this by pulling data from the FanLore page for FanLib, that lists the fandom and the amount of submissions. I turned this data into a dataframe using Pandas, then plotted them using Matplotlib. These graphs demonstrate the growth FanLib had between 2007 and 2008, before it was shut down, but also the massive amount of content published on A03.</p><p>What’s important to remember when looking at this data is that it is not comprehensive. While these were the most popular content submissions on FanLib, most of these are not the most popular content submissions on A03. The fandoms represented in 2008 are much older now, may have finished, or lost popularity as more media was released. When looking at larger fandoms that have thrived, however, such as <em>Star Trek, Star Wars, Supernatural, </em>and <em>Harry Potter, </em>there is a large difference between what content was hosted on FanLib and what is currently hosted on A03. This largely speaks to A03’s success.</p><p> </p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>
  
</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>References:<br/>FanLib Wiki: https://fanlore.org/wiki/FanLib<br/>November 2020 A03 Newsletter: https://archiveofourown.org/admin_posts/1786</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0006"><h2>6. #Tags as Record Keeping</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>A major part of what sets A03 apart as a database and archive is its tagging system. It’s a system that works so well that they were nominated for a Hugo Award in 2019. A tag, in simple terms, is the way a creator categorizes their work. This can be information as simple as Fandom, Characters, Relationships, and Content Warnings. Where the archive becomes a playground of data is the Additional Tags category.</p><p>When posting work to A03, creators have the ability to either use fill-in-the blank tags (ones already canonized by the archive) or create freeform ones. An example of the fill-in examples is in the screenshot below.</p><p>
  
</p><p>After the works are posted with their tags is when the real work begins. Volunteers known as tag wranglers work behind the scenes in specific fandoms to connect tags with the same base content to one another. This allows for a user to search for one particular keyword and <em>actually </em>garner all the results—all without placing restrictions on the author. A true form of both individual ownership but also community-focused engagement.</p><p>If a user wanted to find fanfiction with a fluff focus, they would simply have to type the word into the search bar. But if a user does not know where to start, they can begin with the Browse feature. The tags page is set up as a sort of word cloud, initially showing the most popular tags used in the archive (one of which is <em>fluff</em>).</p><p>
  
</p><p> If a user clicks on one of these tags, it takes them to a page that provides more details about the tag, including “parent” tags and a list of tags with the same meaning. I’ve provided another screenshot that shows all the tags “with the same meaning” as <em>fluff. </em></p><p>
  
</p><p>In comparison, Fanfiction.Net features a much broader, vague, form of recordkeeping. Individual works are only marked by rating, genre, relationship, and character. Creators can not mark their works with other specific terms.</p><p>
  
</p><p>The more specific tagging system (thanks to the work of the wranglers) lends itself to the searchability of A03 as a database. Their Sort &amp; Filter tab provides a plethora of options, ranging from word length, tags, characters, and even what to <em>exclude </em>from the search. Fanfiction.Net has a much simpler filter system that only filters through the limited scope of their “tagging” system.</p><p>A03's Filter system:</p><p>
  
</p><p>FanFiction.Net's Filter System:</p><p>
  
</p><p> </p><p>Unfortunately, since A03 does not currently have an API, a true exploration of the tags as a dataset cannot be explored. As soon as it’s available, however, visualizing the ways in which the tags communicate with each other, how they change from fandom to fandom, and how they change over time will be important to understanding how A03 functions as both an internet and community archive.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Want to check out an article about tags? Check out Gretch McCulloch's article on "Wired" called "Fans are Better than Tech at Organizing Information Online. <br/>https://www.wired.com/story/archive-of-our-own-fans-better-than-tech-organizing-information/</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0007"><h2>7. #The Moment of Danger: Open Doors</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>In the age of the internet, we as consumers as constantly moving forward. We move from browser to browser, social media to social media, site to site with little thought about what gets left behind in the past. As we progress, more and more turns to metaphorical dust. Other internet archives, such as the WayBack Machine, attempt to maintain and preserve our earlier internet iterations. But what happens to fandom content? To those early fandom archives that spawned from the larger sites like FanLib, LiveJournal, and FanFiction.Net.  </p><p>The Organization of Transformative Works recognized this moment of danger and decided to act by creating Open Doors, another project of the organization that focuses on just this issue. They work to preserve fanwork for the future, especially those that are at risk of disappearing.</p><p>Open Doors works to preserve fantext in multiple ways, either through physical or internet archives. On the physical level, there is the “Fan Culture Preservation Project”, which is a partnership between Open Doors and the <a href="https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/fan-culture-preservation/">Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries</a>. On the digital level, Open Doors assists archivists and moderators with either importing at-risk fandoms into A03’s database or hosting the work elsewhere. Even in this project, the mission is to allow the individual complete ownership of the works. Anything uploaded to Open Doors can be identified or deleted later.</p><p>I had the opportunity to interview Open Door Co-Chair, Stephanie Godden (a lifelong fan and veteran volunteer with the OTW), about fandom archives and Open Doors.</p><p>Godden’s definition resonates with Stuart Hall’s and Jeanette Bastian’s own definitions but touches on something more <em>specific </em>about the process. Godden wrote: “I think of an archive as being any online repository where people can post fanworks they’ve created. These works may be fanfiction, fanart, fanvids, podfics, filk, or any other type of fan craft, and they can be either hand-coded where archivists manually create new pages for new works sent to them by creators OR driven by a database that allows creators to upload new works through a mechanism that automatically publishes them. One distinction I would make is that of an archive versus a personal site: an archive has multiple creators, whereas a personal site exclusively contains fanworks created by its owner.”</p><p>Within this archival work is the pivotal role of identifying <em>at-risk </em>fandom archives. While OTW and Open Doors volunteers do not actively seek out these fandoms, individuals can approach the committee about rescuing these fantexts when they know of them. An<em> at-risk </em>fandom archive is “is any archive whose archivist currently lacks the time, interest, or resources to keep the archive online and maintain it. It’s not always obvious or visible whether an archive is at-risk, but some indicators are the archive not having any new works posted to it for months or years and the archivist not appearing to have posted site updates or otherwise logged in for months or years.”</p><p>Over the years, Open Doors has hosted a variety of fandom archives, ranging from Harry Potter to Good Omens to Firefly to Smallville archives. The newest archive to be uploaded into A03 is Rawhide-fic, an archive for works about the western television series <em>Rawhide </em>(1959). (You can read the announcement <a href="https://www.transformativeworks.org/rawhide-fic-is-moving-to-the-ao3/">here</a>) </p><p>Moderators/archivists import these at-risk archives into A03’s larger database either manually or semi-automated, according to Godden. “In manual imports, works are imported either by uploading each work one-by-one from a backup OR by using the Import From URL feature on AO3. In semi-automated imports, our technical volunteers use SQL and Python to create an “import site” that lists all creators from the original archive in alphabetical order and lets you click a button next to a creator to automatically import all of their works. Semi-automated imports are possible for database-driven archives (e.g. eFiction, Automated Archive, or custom database) and are sometimes possible for hand-coded (e.g. HTML, etc.) archives if technical volunteers are provided with a manually compiled spreadsheet containing all metadata for the works to be imported.”</p><p>From this point, induvial creators and archivists can either leave the content as it was or edit it to update the summaries or tags.</p><p>The work Open Doors, underneath the Organization of Transformative Works, is culturally significant because <em>fandom </em>is a cultural phenomenon. As Godden puts it, “Fanfiction and other fanworks are an important way that fans communicate with and “talk back” to the source material of the fandoms they love, and I think it’s important to preserve fanworks because they will play such an important role for future historians and anthropologists in understanding today’s culture as it relates to consuming fandoms.”</p><p>
  
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Want to read an article on the WayBack Machine and Archiving the Internet? Check out Jill Lepore's article in "The New Yorker", "The Cobweb: Can the Internet Be Archived?" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/26/cobweb</p><p>References:<br/>The Fan Culture Preservation Project: https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/fan-culture-preservation/<br/>Open Doors Wiki: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Open_Doors</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
<a name="section0008"><h2>8. Epilogue: #The Interview</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>The entirety of my interview with Stephanie Godden, December 2020</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <strong>Identifying Questions</strong>
</p><ul>
<li>Name, Role with the OTW (if applicable): Stephanie Godden — co-chair for Open Doors Committee, staffer for Communications Committee, staffer for Fanlore Committee. I also have formerly served as a Tag Wrangler, a staffer for the Volunteers &amp; Recruiting Committee, and a staffer for the Elections Committee.</li>
<li>Age: 27</li>
<li>What was your first fandom? What is/are your current fandom(s)?: My first fandom was <em>Harry Potter</em>. I’m in between fandoms at the moment, but others I’ve been invested in in the past include <em>Supernatural</em>, <em>Stranger Things</em>, <em>Glee</em>, <em>Teen Titans</em>, and <em>Codename: Kids Next Door</em>, among others.</li>
</ul><p> </p><p>
  <strong>Exploring Fandom</strong>
</p><ul>
<li>What fandom communities/sites have you utilized? (For example, there is A03, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Zines, etc.): From about ages 10 to 12, I was a member of several small archives and forums specific to <em>Harry Potter</em> and <em>Teen Titans</em> and used them both socially and to publish fic. When I was 13ish, I migrated to <a href="http://fanfiction.net/">fanfiction.net</a>, where I published fanworks as well as frequented several forums, one of which I helped moderate. I moved from <a href="http://fanfiction.net/">fanfiction.net</a> to AO3 when I was about 23 (in early 2016), and I started volunteering for the OTW as an Open Doors staffer in February 2017. I also had a LiveJournal when I was 11-12ish and a Tumblr when I was probably about 20.</li>
<li>Of the communities/sites you’ve used, how do they hold up against A03 as an archive? Are they more or less user friendly, searchable, etc.?: Thanks to AO3’s tagging system, AO3 has been by far the most searchable archive that I’ve ever posted on. I’ve also found it to be the most user-friendly archive I’ve used because of its extensive help documentation (provided by the AO3 Documentation Committee) and the teams of volunteers (like on the Support Committee and the Policy &amp; Abuse Committee) available to contact if you encounter any questions, bugs, or other problems. This compares to <a href="http://fanfiction.net/">fanfiction.net</a>'s notorious purges of content and the difficulty users would have reaching anyone who runs the site if they needed help.</li>
<li>What is your favorite way to interact with fandom? Why?: For me, it’s a tie. I love writing fic because it allows me to have a conversation with fandom by using, playing with, and subverting the tropes and themes that you commonly see in certain fandoms. I also really love reading headcanons and meta that people share on sites like Tumblr, because they frequently analyze the source material in interesting ways and point out connections that I hadn’t noticed on my own.</li>
</ul><p> </p><p>
  <strong>The Nature of Archives</strong>
</p><ul>
<li>How would you define the term “archive”?: I think of an archive as being any online repository where people can post fanworks they’ve created. These works may be fanfiction, fanart, fanvids, podfics, filk, or any other type of fan craft, and they can be either hand-coded where archivists manually create new pages for new works sent to them by creators OR driven by a database that allows creators to upload new works through a mechanism that automatically publishes them. One distinction I would make is that of an archive versus a personal site: an archive has multiple creators, whereas a personal site exclusively contains fanworks created by its owner.</li>
<li>What is an “at-risk” fandom or fandom archive to you? To the OTW, if your definitions differ.: I think my definition is probably on par with the OTW’s definition, which is that an at-risk archive is any archive whose archivist currently lacks the time, interest, or resources to keep the archive online and maintain it. It’s not always obvious or visible whether an archive is at-risk, but some indicators are the archive not having any new works posted to it for months or years and the archivist not appearing to have posted site updates or otherwise logged in for months or years.</li>
<li>Why do you think it’s important to archive fandom culture? To save at-risk fandoms?: Fanfiction and other fanworks are an important way that fans communicate with and “talk back” to the source material of the fandoms they love, and I think it’s important to preserve fanworks because they will play such an important role for future historians and anthropologists in understanding today’s culture as it relates to consuming fandoms. Also, as someone who has read quite a lot of fic over the years, I just think it’s a shame when fanworks are lost and can no longer be accessed by past or future audiences who might miss those works!</li>
<li>How important is it to you that A03 and Open Doors are run by fans rather than larger institutions? Do you think that a larger institution such as the Library of Congress could accomplish the same community foundation fans have created?: I think it’s pretty important! Only fans have a personal stake in the laws surrounding fair use and permissibility of content—it was fans who were hurt by purges of content on sites like <a href="http://fanfiction.net/">fanfiction.net</a> and the monetization of fanworks by sites like FanLib, so it’s fans who understand how important it is to have a safe space where any fannish content is permitted as long as it’s legal. Someone like the Library of Congress wouldn’t necessarily be able to understand fans’ goals and priorities and cater to those when maintaining an archive, although at the very least it’s good that the Library of Congress isn’t a commercial institution—part of the appeal of AO3 is that it doesn’t have ads, so the organization running it (OTW) doesn’t have a vested financial stake in anything else.</li>
<li>What do you think of Open Doors and A03 as a sort of archival monolith in fandom? While A03 is open to allowing fans to maintain their own artifacts and keep their individual ownership, work like Open Doors suggests that A03 is sort of consuming other, smaller archives.: Open Doors is happy to help preserve those archives that can no longer keep their doors open, whether it be due to resources/finances, lack of time, or lack of interest—but we will never have the resources to subsume all fanworks archives into the AO3, and our goal is to preserve only the works that need preserving by a new party. AO3’s source code is also open to anyone who might want to use it to create their own archive based on the same code (with the caveat that our code is still evolving and improving over time and the site is still technically in beta).</li>
</ul><p> </p><p><strong>How to be an Archivist:</strong> I’ve left this section blank as I have never myself been an archivist.</p><p> </p><p>
  <strong>The Nature of Open Doors</strong>
</p><ul>
<li>What inspired Open Doors to form?: I do know that fans had started to make requests that the OTW do something to help save disappearing fanworks archives and that this was the impetus for the project to be formed, but I can’t go into a great amount of detail as I wasn’t around for this!</li>
<li>How does Open Doors locate at-risk fandoms? The FAQ page says that fans who wish to be moderators for a collection are responsible. However, I’m curious if folks who volunteer with Open Doors scour the internet for fandoms or fandom archives that need saving.: At the moment, we don’t have the resources to search online ourselves looking for archives to rescue; all of the archives we import come to us by either archivists who approach us wanting to work with us or fans who request that we contact the archivist of an archive who subsequently says yes to working with us.</li>
<li>What sorts of fandom sites/projects have Open Doors saved?: There is a full list of the archives Open Doors has rescued available on Fanlore: <a href="https://fanlore.org/wiki/Open_Doors">https://fanlore.org/wiki/Open_Doors</a> Open Doors’ website also lists several Special Collections: <a href="https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/foresmutters-project/">https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/foresmutters-project/</a>, <a href="https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/kista-1986-and-demeter-1987-two-novels-jane-land/">https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/kista-1986-and-demeter-1987-two-novels-jane-land/</a>, <a href="https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/missed-saturday-dance/">https://opendoors.transformativeworks.org/missed-saturday-dance/</a>
</li>
<li>If you could explain a project to someone outside fandom as a way to demonstrate the important work Open Doors and the OTW are doing, what would you tell them?: Fandom and fanworks provide an important framework for understanding society, culture, and how people engage with fictional works and the media. Open Doors is working with the permission of archivists to preserve fanworks from archives that otherwise might disappear due to lack of funds, time, or interest on the part of the archivist. </li>
<li>What software is used to complete the import? What about fandoms that are from the early stages of the internet.: Open Doors has two types of imports: manual and semi-automated. In manual imports, works are imported either by uploading each work one-by-one from a backup OR by using the Import From URL feature on AO3. In semi-automated imports, our technical volunteers use SQL and Python to create an “import site” that lists all creators from the original archive in alphabetical order and lets you click a button next to a creator to automatically import all of their works. Semi-automated imports are possible for database-driven archives (e.g. eFiction, Automated Archive, or custom database) and are sometimes possible for hand-coded (e.g. HTML, etc.) archives if technical volunteers are provided with a manually compiled spreadsheet containing all metadata for the works to be imported.</li>
<li>How do older texts get framed in A03’s larger database? (For instance, is it on the moderator and individual writers to tag their own works): For database-driven archives being imported to the AO3 via our semi-automated process, our coders are able to automatically port in the tags used on the original archive and “map” them to the corresponding canonical tags on AO3—so when we click a button to import a work, the desired tags are automatically attached to that work, without anyone needing to manually tag the work. On the other hand, for archives being imported manually, the archivist doing the importing is asked to add the appropriate tags to each work as they import them. In both cases, creators who claim their imported works are welcome to change the tags and other metadata as they see fit.</li>
<li>Any other insights you want to impart on readers or myself, who have just discovered Open Doors?: Not that I can think of specifically, but I’m happy to answer any follow-up questions you may have!</li>
</ul><p>
  
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<a name="section0009"><h2>9. #Epilogue: Graph Coding Using Pandas</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I used Jupyter Notebooks to make and save my graphs for this project.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>#Import the necessary tools<br/>import numpy as np <br/>import pandas as pd<br/>import matplotlib.pyplot as plt <br/>from matplotlib.patches import Polygon <br/>import seaborn as sns</p><p> </p><p>#Create the dataframe</p><p>lib08 = {'Fandom': ['Original Fandom', 'Naruto', 'Harry Potter', 'Inuyasha', 'Transformers/Beast Wars', 'Star Trek: KVP', 'Star Wars', 'Yu-Gi-Oh', 'Star Trek', 'Star Trek: The Original Series', 'X-Men: Evolution', 'Pokemon', 'Buffy:The Vampire Slayer', 'Bleach', 'Pirates of the Caribbean', 'Twilight', 'Gilmore Girls', 'Supernatural', 'CSI', 'Battlestar Galactica: 2003', 'Kingdom Hearts', 'Stargate: SG-1', 'Star Trek: Enterprise', 'Uglies', 'X-Men', 'Thunderbirds', 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine', 'Stargate: Atlantis', 'Star Trek: The Next Generation', 'Sailor Moon'],<br/>        'Fic_Counts': [5497 , 4041, 1759, 1693, 948, 864, 737, 603, 556, 545, 511, 452, 430, 429, 394, 381, 326, 319, 311, 308, 301, 301, 267, 262, 246, 218, 212, 209, 204, 202]}<br/>df2 = pd.DataFrame(lib08, columns = ['Fandom', 'Fic_Counts'])</p><p> </p><p>#Plot the figure</p><p>plt.figure(figsize=(15,10))<br/>splot= sns.barplot(x= "Fic_Counts", y= "Fandom", data=df2)<br/>for p in splot.patches:<br/>        width = p.get_width()<br/>        plt.text(0.5+p.get_width(), p.get_y()+0.55*p.get_height(),<br/>             '{:1.0f}'.format(width),<br/>             ha='left', va='center', fontweight="bold")<br/>plt.xlabel("Fic Counts", size=14)<br/>plt.ylabel("Fandoms", size=14)<br/>plt.title("FanLib Fanfiction May 2008", fontsize=22, fontweight="bold")<br/>plt.savefig('FanLib Fanfiction May 2008 final.jpg',bbox_inches='tight', dpi=150)</p><p> </p><p>
  
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